The Future Belongs To The Weird

This essay is telescopic. It can shrink or expand, depending on how much attention you are willing to give. This is the original version (2785 words). Show other sizes.or the gospel for those out of distribution If you were born in pre-modern times, the last thing you wanted to be was weird. Because the most likely outcome of being weird was dying an untimely and painful death. Unusually weak? They will not want to feed you. Unusually strong? They will send you to fight an impossible war. Unusually clever? They will accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake. Yes, there were some exceptions (for example, "freaks" kept as curiosities by the kings), but the general rule for the vast majority of the population was: don't be weird, or get killed. The European pre-modernity was not unique in this way. Every age and culture seemed to find its own way of punishing those who had an uncontrolled tendency to look or behave out of distribution. Thus trying your best to blend in, concealing your spiky sides, behaving in predictably average ways and staying "on rails" used to be the most rational life strategy for the vast majority of people who have ever lived. To be fair, most cultures also developed deliberate valves and institutional escape hatches for excess weirdness. These valves could be broadly categorized into 3 types: temporal, spatial and role-based. Temporal ones were restricted to certain times of the year: for example, during the Dionysian orgies the usual societal rails and expectations were suspended. Then the spatial valves were about the designated areas where you could escape the system: bugger off into the wilderness or sail to the New World and do what you want. Temporal and spatial escape hatches can often be combined for maximum containment: Burning Man is both a time and a place. And then there were role-based escape hatches: the village idiot, the king's jester, untouchable castes or certain kinds of monks. If you needed to only escape the system occasionally - go knock yourself out at a festival. If you were not ready to comply with the societal rails on a permanent basis - become a hermit. Or a pirate. Or run away with the circus. Or go found a new colony (because in those wild and beautiful days the frontier was still endless and order-abiding societal enclaves were still an exception in the vast, scary, free-for-all dance of mother nature). Staying normal was expected, and rational. Escaping the system was rare and dangerous and irrational, but possible and somewhat accepted. But slowly, and then suddenly, the frontier shrank, the industrial models of production and education marched across the Earth, and the situation changed for the weird ones. In some ways it got better, obviously: these days almost nobody gets literally burned at the stake for being too clever or contrarian (though recent outbursts of cancel culture got suspiciously close to the ways of the Inquisition). Overall, it's fair to say that the majority of the population is not facing the "don't be weird or die" dilemma. Yet in other ways, the rails also got stronger and the escape hatches fewer. Skip college and your chances of getting past the automated CV filter are vanishingly small. Ruin your score with Meta and good luck ever really escaping the shadowban, no matter which country you try to reconnect from. Global institutions, global databases, global algorithms, global castaways. It's a lot harder these days to just "set sail to America and start a new life". But I don't want to talk about the "evil system" here, for that has been talked about enough. Let us instead talk about how and why "the system" used to work and why its days may be numbered. Before we speculate how the system may end, we have to try and understand how it began and what keeps it going. So why was it good to be normal in the first place? Humans, like all life, are engaged in a constant (and ultimately hopeless) battle against the forces of chaos and confusion (a.k.a. the second law of thermodynamics). Evolution equipped her warrior children with various weapons. The hydra can regenerate. The virus can use other bodies to propagate its patterns. Our weapons of choice have been intellect and institutions. Intellect allows us to identify existing patterns in the environment and use them to our advantage. Institutions allow us to effectively pool our individual agencies to propagate our own patterns across space and time. The main thing that you build institutions from is other humans. And so for other humans to be an effective building material, they need to be predictable and interchangeable: what you can predict - you can control. What you can predict - you can rely on and build from. The more reliable a component a human is - the easier it is to use them as a cog, a building block in an organisation (an army, a factory, a company, a church, a country). If someone is trying to build and scale an effective institution, a system that is complex but reliable - they don't want their components to be too weird. The complexity of the system should emerge from its overall design, but its reliability can only come from the simplicity and predictability of the components. At least this is what you tend believe if your intuition about building comes from building houses out of clay bricks. Or if you conceive the world as a clock. Imagine building a clock - would you want your cogs to be spiky? Or changing over time? Clearly not. And so, as the clock mechanism has been the metaphor of the world and the dominant model for our institutions for at least three centuries, it's no surprise that the predictability of components has increasingly been the baseline measure of their value. You may object that science departed from the clockwork-like world model over a hundred years ago in favour of the weird world of probabilities. And you would be right. The problem is the quantum world is too strange, too counterintuitive for our culture to adopt. It doesn't match our lego-like macro intuitions. You may object that modern biology and agriculture could also provide a compelling alternative to the "clockwork" metaphor for the builders of societies. For example, bioelectric experiments are showing that the best way to create reliable and resilient systems is not to have predictable and uniform components, but to have components capable of learning and adapting and communicating with each other freely, while the larger blueprints and environmental constraints and incentives provide the overall developmental direction. Again you would be right. And yet, even in the face of such overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, this all seems too subtle or too early or too far from our everyday intuitions, and so we are stuck with clock-like institutions. For now al least. As long as narrowly Newtonian worldview persists in pop-culture, most builders of societal systems will keep thinking in clockwork terms. And in clockwork land, every single one of your cogs better be exactly the way you expect it to be. And if one breaks or changes - you better be able to order a replacement that would slot right in (hello, industrial education!). To summarize: from the beginnings of history to the present day being weird has been a risky and mostly unprofitable business. In the early stages of our fight against chaos this preference for predictability was necessary: too much individual weirdness woult get the whole society extinct. So weirdness had to be discouraged. The exact way in which being weird was punished changed over time and the escape hatches available differed. But the overall direction has been steady and the mechanical clockwork obsession of the past few centuries has not made being weird any more profitable or rational than before. Statistically speaking, life used to favour the average and it continues to favour the average in the present day. Now on to the good news. I don't think the "normal == good" status quo will be the case for much longer. Yes, this is my gospel for the misfits, the weirdos and the out-of-distribution ones, for theirs is the unimaginable future we are about to enter. My argument at its core is simple: Being normal (or at least suppressing your inner weirdness enough to appear normal to others) used to be a good strategy for most people because being normal == being predictable == being useful in the context of larger structures of society. The value of being predictable and therefore the incentives to be predictable were much higher for the majority of people than the value of being strange. The risk / reward calculus of being strange was not worth it. It only made sense to be strange for those who simply couldn't help being strange, no matter the cost. But with AI (disembodied in software and embodied in robots), the relative value of being normal and predictable is rapidly evaporating. If you can be predicted, you can be modeled and automated away. You can't out-cog a robot any more than you can outwork one. Robots will soon be able to provide the necessary overall stability to the institutions in a way that is more reliable and cheaper than humans. If your value to others is conditioned on the fact that you can achieve a certain measurable outcome, and do it well and do it over and over, then you are now competing with the price of electricity, which is not a good thing to compete with. Or in (loosely) cybernetic terms: when a system is no longer in constant danger of being overtaken by chaos, the value of the individual is proportionate to the amount of (unique, unexpected) information they add to the system.